When you’ve just had an orgasm, do you have a euphoric sensation akin to when Dorothy went from black-and-white Kansas to Technicolor Oz? A postcoital rush of vitality that infuses your entire world? A sense of all things shivering with light?
Naomi Wolf professes to have climaxes so transcendent that they seem to transform her, albeit briefly, into Snow White. “My partner and I had just made love,” the author writes in the introduction to her new book. “I looked out of the window at the trees tossing their new leaves and the wind lifting their branches in great waves, and it all looked like an intensely choreographed dance, in which all of nature was expressing something. The moving grasses, the sweeping tree branches, the birds calling from invisible locations in the dappled shadows … I thought, it is back.” A degenerative spinal disease had led to a compressed pelvic nerve that had been making Ms. Wolf’s climaxes ho-hum, you see, and she wasn’t about to take it lying down. And thus a humble crotch nerve launched the labia-gazing investigation that informs Vagina: A New Biography (Ecco, 400 pp., $27.99).
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